I like to imagine you as that man who fled to Antiva and became a scribe. Resourceful, a little cunning, hopeful, penniless, and possessed with the audacity of claiming for yourself a life of your own making. I am making it more romantic in my mind than I am sure it felt at the time, but in my imagining, I picture having met you then. Perhaps I have also pretended myself into some other story. Perhaps we'd have loved one another beyond all of the painful burdens of mage history, the uncertain future. It is not that I wish for this, only that it is nice to think about.
But you did not remain there. You came back to it all, and I know, romances aside, that thing in you that cannot leave well enough alone is so much a part of how I love you. That you see something the same in me, for all that the form it takes is often so different.
You are better with argument than I, and in a letter or a lifetime, I could not make you believe that my passing would be in some way acceptable. I suppose I don't wish to. How good it has been to have you care for me, to become frustrated and worried and perhaps even angry because of how you care for me. I told you that I only want my time with both of you to be good, given how much I intruded upon it. This is still true - but you have convinced me that it is always good, even when it isn't.
So I will impress upon you the idea that this continues to be so. I am sorry we do not have more time but I cannot be sorry for the time we have had.
I love you. I hope that this world can be reasoned with in exactly the way you believe it can be. That it is composed of mostly decent people (and, as well, impressionable people) that can be convinced of what is good and true. You did, anyway, convince me.
letter to julius.